A New Year

After a 4 month hiatus I’m back to blogging. Hopefully some of the new readers will be parents of new McMaster students. It was a pleasure to meet some of you at Welcome Day on August 8^th. Last year at this time my blog was an introduction to myself and Student Affairs. Since I’ll hopefully have some new readers this year, this year’s initial blog is also introductory. Below is an article that will appear in the Welcome Week issue of The Silhouette – McMaster’s student newspaper. Thanks for tuning in, I’ll get to some more topical things over the coming weeks.

I’m Dr. Phil Wood, Associate Vice President (Student Affairs). No, not that Dr. Phil! I’m Dr. Phil your Dean of Students. I’m pleased to welcome all new students to McMaster University as well as welcoming back all returning students. I’m delighted to have been offered this opportunity to tell all of you a little bit about me, what we offer in Student Affairs and why getting engaged with the university (whether through Student Affairs or the MSU) will be beneficial to your success at Mac.

First, a little bit about me. I’m a native of Brantford and went to the University of Waterloo. I earned my PhD at Caltech in Pasadena California and have been a professor of chemical engineering for more than 30 years – the first 5 at Michigan State and the last 25+ at McMaster. For the past six years I have been Associate VP and Dean of Students.

Student Affairs at McMaster is a large operation. Our consolidated budget is in excess of $70 million. You can learn about all of the Student Affairs departments by going to our website: studentaffairs.mcmaster.ca . While on the site I would ask that you check out our Annual Review: “Connecting Communities”. This report contains feature articles as well as updates from various Student Affairs departments for the 2007 year.

Of course, these days, one of the most prevalent Student Affairs departments is the First Year Experience Office (FYEO). They coordinate Welcome Week activities having just completed Welcome Day. One of my proudest achievements in Student Affairs is the creation of the IRIS production and I especially thank Michele Corbeil for her inspiration. Hopefully you all have, or will see it. During the year the FYEO will be engaged in First Generation student activities and our assessment exercises.

One of the largest departments is Athletics & Recreation. The new David Braley Athletic Centre (known as D-BAC) is the hub for all or your recreational needs on campus. Our varsity basketball and volleyball Marauders play in the Burridge Gymnasium in the Ivor Wyne Centre. Of course the big news this year will be the grand opening of the Ron Joyce Stadium on September 13^th as a prelude to the Marauder football game versus Ottawa. We’ll have two football games on Friday evenings this year as well in an effort to get more students out to a game before they head home for the weekend.

So come and check out the new stadium and see our Marauders. Coach P tells me that we’ll have a young, exciting team this year. You should also make good use of the DBAC. McMaster students have pledged $20 million towards the construction of this building and with the Ron Joyce Stadium gives us arguably the best facilities in Canada. This financial gift from the students was unprecedented in Canada and all of us in senior administration are extremely grateful to the generosity of the students. (Who also donated a like amount to the McMaster University Student Centre – the MUSC).

Over my six years as Dean of Students we have opened two new residences – Mary E Keyes and Les Prince Hall bringing our number of be spaces to over 3700. Each of these residences was built in response to student needs – suites in Keyes and singles and doubles with in-room bathrooms in Les Prince. Our Res Life team is the model for many universities in Ontario and we work collaboratively with the resident student government, the IRC.

I have eaten on several campuses during my career and from my experience we have the best campus food in the country. There is not a better campus restaurant than the East Meets West Bistro and we are equally proud of Bridges – our vegetarian café. Bridges was a joint effort between Hospitality Services and a student group which came up with the concept. Both East meets West and Bridges have won national and North American awards from campus food organizations.

Student Affairs is also home of the Campus Health Centre and the Centre for Student Development (CSD). Both are in the lower level of the MUSC. Campus Health is a state of the art medical clinic and is constantly rated in the top two or three campus health centres in the country. It is also the home of our health education team. CSD is where to go if you need help. It’s the home of our disability services, counselling services and study skills/time management support. It is also the host (with Career Services) of our very innovative Leadership Certificate Programme and Peer Helper programme.

Career Services is located on the first floor of Gilmour Hall and is a good place to go for help with your career aspirations and to learn more about job hunting skills. Don’t wait until your last year to begin this process. Check it out early to see what sort of careers are out there. Student Financial Aid and Scholarships is right inside the main doors of Gilmour Hall. Students who are on OSAP should attend this office and make an on-line application for a bursary. Again, more information is available for this (and all offices) on their website.

Finally, I would like to stress (particularly to the new students) the importance of getting involved at McMaster. Nowadays the word we use is “engagement”. Research has shown that students who are more engaged at university do better. It’s as simple as that. Likewise, universities that do a better job of engaging students can be judged to be of higher quality than those that do a poorer job. Luckily for you, McMaster does an excellent job with engaging students.

For the past four years we have been involved in a large study called the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE). Consistently over those past four years McMaster has been rated amongst the best universities in Canada in terms of engagement. Check out McMaster’s NSSE webpage: http://www.mcmaster.ca/avppa/nsse.html for its results to date. You might also be interested in the paper I wrote: “An Introduction to NSSE and a Brief Discussion of McMaster’s Performance in 2006″ that is available for download from the site and explains the survey and the research that backs it up.

There are tons of ways to become engaged – you can join an MSU club, get a job on campus, volunteer, get involved with a research project in your department, play sports or just work out. One of the exciting new programmes that we are offering in Student Affairs is “Service Learning” which you can learn about on our website. I hope that all of you have a very successful year in 2008-09. Stop me to say hi if you see me. I expect to be shaking hands again with all of the first year students and usually attend all of the McMaster sporting and student events.

Catching Up: Violence and Mental Health

It has been a long time between posts! I took a bit of vacation and then had a lot of work to get caught up on. Now there is far too much happening to even focus on a single issue. However, I have been asked to speak at a workshop: http://www.caubo.ca/pandemic/workshops_emergency_agenda_e.cfm . The workshop is on Emergency Preparedness and is sponsored by the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO). CAUBO represents the administrative and finance executives at universities. The audience for this workshop will be university security people, administration and student affairs professionals. I will be the only Student affairs person speaking and will be trying to educate the audience on our student body. The people that they are supposed to be protecting.

I agreed to speak at this workshop before the most recent campus shootings at Northern Illinois University (NIU): http://www.thestar.com/article/304347 . The incident was also covered in insidehighered.com the day after it occurred and then in a slightly corrected form on the following Monday. Presumably everyone knows the story by now. A graduate student named Steven Kazmierczak returned to NIU with 3 guns, entered a lecture hall and proceeded to shoot and kill four students and himself. The entire incident lasted just a few minutes. The NIU shootings followed by about a week an attack at Louisiana Technical College where a nursing student killed two classmates before turning the gun on herself.

It was discovered soon after the NIU shootings that Mr. Kazmierczak (who was actually a graduate student at the University of Illinois) had been taking medication for a mental illness but had discontinued taking his medicine. The Chicago Tribune has been diligent in its coverage of the NIU shootings and this article should be consulted for a link to the current status. This past Monday, for example, students returned to class at NIU. This USA Today report has links to other papers as well. One of the very disturbing discoveries has been that the same gun dealer was involved in both the NIU and The Virginia Tech shootings.

I have not been able to find much additional information about the Louisiana Tech shootings. The Chronicle of Higher Education has found “no answers”. There is no question that this shooting has received much less media coverage than either the NIU or VTU shootings. For example, I am unsure whether or not the shooter at Virginia Tech (Latina Williams) had any history of mental illness or not. It is noteworthy that according to a later article in the Chronicle: “Louisiana Technical had immediately activated its emergency-response plan, and instructors told students to stay in their classrooms. Some remained there for hours as police interviewed witnesses, according to news reports.” This brings me back to my reason for writing this blog. Do these “emergency response” plans have any effect? And more importantly, is there any way that the shootings can be stopped before they happen? (For now the title of my presentation at CAUBO is: “Student Counselling to Recognize “at risk” Individuals and how to Intervene Before Violence Occurs”. I’ll probably change it!

Attention seems to focus on university counseling centres after campus shootings. Especially if it is revealed that the shooter had been seeking help for a “mental illness”. After all, if the centres know that they have a nut on their hands, why don’t they tell the police and put her or him (usually) away? This is what is being proposed at Arizona State University where the headline in a recent issue of the student newspaper read:
Should hidden mental health issues be exposed?

After recent fatal campus shootings, ASU examines whether to require students to disclose mental health histories

 

The answer is: No!

In a very heartfelt essay, Dr. Jonathan Perry, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Arkansas wrote: “I will not be at all surprised if, somehow or other, it emerges that Kazmierczak had been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition while at NIU and prescribed medication for it. I will not be surprised if he was treated at either the counseling center or the health center (or both) there. I will not be surprised if it turns out that he was being treated, or had been, by the counseling center and/or the health center at UIUC. (Let me state that I DO NOT have any insider information. I know nothing that hasn’t come straight from the media, nor do I expect to. So please do not take what I have just written as “the truth”.) In other words, I will not be surprised to learn that he was one of THEM–people with mental disorders. Except “them” is us. NUTS-R-US. Twenty-five percent of Americans suffer from at least one episode of a mental disorder every year. TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT. We believe that this number applies to college students as well, and it may be even higher.”

“There is emerging a tremendous pressure for campuses to do something about “them”. Many actions are admirable: the founding of student peer support groups such as Active Minds, the pumping of additional resources into student mental health services, the tremendous support offered students with psychiatric disabilities. But there is also a growing number of potentially dangerous and poorly conceived efforts to find out who “they” are: requirements that incoming students disclose their mental health treatment history (see ASU), weakening of rules concerning the confidentiality of contacts with counseling centers and health centers, the ejection from campus of “them” if they get into any trouble at all or if their suffering and symptoms are too evident. I said after Virginia Tech that one result of that tragedy would be the targeting for suspicion of all of the creepy, quirky, weird, or unpleasant students, and I was right. It has happened, it IS happening, and now it is just going to get worse, because “we” are scared of “them”.

I write this because my job at the CAUBO workshop will be to describe what we are doing at McMaster University to prevent the kind of shootings that we are seeing on campuses in the U.S. but we in Canada are not immune either. The problem is: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a police or security officer everything looks like a security problem. A simple way to solve the problem – get rid of anyone who has a mental illness. However, as Dr. Perry suggests above, it’s not that simple. At a school the size of McMaster, there are hundreds of students with significant psychological problems. Our work in Student Affairs is not to try to identify the one who might do something destructive. Our job is to help as many as we can to be successful students. Our view is that by providing the supports necessary we will not only be able to help students, there is a greater possibility that we will be able to identify the persons who are likely to harm themselves or others.

I am working on my presentation now and will use some of it for my next posting.

Research Over Head!

In this week’s posting I’ll be wearing another of my hats – that of a full Professor in chemical engineering. My motivation for the blog comes from an article by Elizabeth Church that appeared in the Globe and Mail: “Will Alberta’s energy boom revolutionize higher education?”. The thesis of the article is in its second paragraph: “As oil-boom riches roll in, expectations are building that this new wealth will transform higher education in the province and shake up the postsecondary landscape of the country. Billions in research funds, a campus building boom and university leaders with full pockets on the hunt for talent are adding to the buzz.”

The President of the University of Alberta, Indira Samarasekera, would like to put her school into the top 20 in the world by the year 2020. She believes that the province’s present economic advantage should be used to attract academic (read research) talent to the university to increase its prestige. Current rankings by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University have the U of A in the top 101-150 category and ranked 5^th in Canada. (The present world-wide rankings for Canadian universities are: U of T (23^rd), UBC (36^th), McGill (63^rd), McMaster (87^th), Alberta (101-150), Waterloo (151-200), Montreal (151-200),(Calgary (203-304)..).

The University of Calgary has opted to focus on four key areas. According to its President, Harvey Weingarten, “If you don’t establish priorities, then you will diffuse the impact of any money you spend”. I think that in the end Calgary’s focused approach will be best. However they are still focusing on research at the expense of the student experience.

One thing that I have observed is that you can’t buy a reputation. When I was a grad student in the mid 70s Texas was flush with money (it was the days of the Arab oil embargo and a drive within the U.S. to become more energy self-sufficient). Texas universities were trying to attract top faculty members and graduate students by paying them more or, in the case of professors, giving them large start-up grants. It didn’t work. The University of Texas was already a good research university and got slightly better. (It is typically listed in the top 10 Engineering schools in the U.S News and World Report “Best Graduate Schools” and top 5-6 in chemical engineering). The University of Houston however spent a lot of money and didn’t get much to show for it. I used to show potential graduate students around our department at Caltech. Invariably they would already have an offer of admission to the University of Houston with a much higher stipend. To my knowledge, no student took an offer from Houston over Caltech simply for the money. Likewise a high powered faculty member was recruited to Houston and paid a lot of money. His view was that the university was simply buying his reputation and essentially did no work.

In addition, it is getting more and more difficult to do high level research in both Canada and the U.S. This has led the Presidents of some of the top research universities to advocate for more selective funding. In an article from Maclean’s magazine, University of British Columbia president Stephen J. Toope says research funding should be focused on a small number of world-class universities, including UBC and maybe two other Canadian universities. “Rather than spreading research funding around in an unstructured and misguided effort to be fair — to provide a bland level of sameness in all regions of the province and the country — we must spend strategically on institutions that are legitimately able to compete on the international stage.” I wonder what the Presidents of the Alberta universities think of this.

A remarkably similar situation has just presented itself in the United States. The provosts of 11 public universities in the Midwest of the U.S. have published a letter in Business Week taking exception to quotes attributed there to Drew Faust, Harvard University’s new president. Faust was quoted last month as expressing concern about the state of federal support for research. She predicted that Harvard and a few other elite universities would be fine. “They’re going to be — we hope, we trust, we assume — the survivors in this race,” she said. The article went on to say: “As for the many lesser universities likely to lose market share, she adds, they would be wise ‘to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious’ as those of Harvard and its peers.” The provosts’ letter said that they “emphatically reject” the idea that they should settle for less ambitious research. The letter acknowledged that budget limits have hurt public universities, but went on to say that the solution is providing these universities with adequate funds, not diminishing their role. “If we are to continue the extraordinary process of discovery and creativity that is the hallmark of our great research universities, we must be willing to provide the support our public institutions need to sustain their educational and scientific excellence. The ultimate stakeholder is the nation. And the stakes are high,” the letter concluded. Notably, other universities in Canada offered a sharp rebuttal to President Toope’s proposal as well.

A side-bar article by Elizabeth Church in the same issue of the Globe: “While research funds flow, the basics suffer” gives the student side of the story. According to Church: “While Alberta pumps billions into building projects and research initiatives at university and college campuses, student leaders say some basic needs such as student services, residence and undergraduate instruction have been overlooked”. A particular challenge in Alberta is housing. Due to a shortage of on-campus housing students must compete with workers and families moving to the Province to find work. The cost of off-campus housing is skyrocketing while the vacancy rate is nearly zero.

A story in the Edmonton Journal notes that student leaders at the University of Alberta are planning a month of protest to challenge a pair of proposed fee increases: a 4.6-per-cent hike to tuition and an 8.75-per-cent jump to residence rates. Notably though, the proposed fee increases would still keep Alberta’s fees well below those paid by Ontario students. The cost of a residence room would increase to approximately $300 per month while Ontario universities are charging in the neighbourhood of $400 to $500. In Ontario first year tuition for Engineering students ranges from $6,500 to $7,500 per year.

There is no question that research costs a university to conduct. Granting agencies give very little to the universities to cover the indirect costs of doing research. To a company, having to pay overhead on a research contract will often negate the deal. This should be contrasted to the U.S. where research overhead rates on 70 to 100% are the norm and the universities are still crying about the costs. On the other hand, building a research reputation is the quickest way to improve the university’s overall reputation. Research has an international audience. At McMaster, discoveries in our medical school are frequently touted in national and even international newspapers. Student life and teaching are much more local issues. Universities can be known locally as a good place to go – I could list several examples in Southern Ontario – but none of them will make the top 20 in the world rankings as President Samarasekera desires. Perhaps the best that we can do is emulate the University of Western Ontario which proudly proclaims on its homepage: “Western provides the best student experience among Canada’s leading research-intensive universities”.